“I go to prepare a place for you….”

Chapter Four

A time to plant & a time to uproot what is planted (harvest)…

Ecclesiastes 3:26

Popular culture would have us believe that everyone will have the same experience at death.

However, three years earlier the following happened, these excerpts are taken from my personal journal during that period…

Malaysia….September, 1980…

I have been observing the people at Dalat School across the road since I have been spending time there (the Alliance international school).

Many of the staff, especially Lois Chandler (school’s RN) and Betty Mitchell (school’s Dietician), actually live kindness, gentleness, joy and meekness. But have a strength that is unique, there’s something special in these people.

They’re real though, not perfect, no human is but they have a belief in God that is personal, not religious or ritualistic but very real and personal!

They talk about God, Jesus and His Spirit as though personal friends…

I grew up in a church atmosphere…

Where God and Jesus were too aloof to personally connect with and the Holy Spirit was a mystical being that I could only reach through the church leaders who had exclusive and secret knowledge.

Those at Dalat live and share their relationship that they have with God and what He is doing in their lives…

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I want a relationship like that with God the Father, one that is personal and intimate not impersonal…

I have been reading in the Scriptures of the old testament…that God hadn’t wanted a religious or ritualistic relationship with people any longer…

So at the right time in human history He sent His Son Jesus, the promised Savior from the very beginning, to pave the way for us to be able to choose a personal relationship with Him…

Jesus said that we needed to be ‘born anew of the Spirit’ in John 3: 5… And I realized this meant accepting that God had sent Jesus to bridge the gap between us and Him…

A gap that had been created by Adam and Eve in the garden...I also read that Jesus had accepted this task with joy in His amazing love for us…wow!

Jesus had come to earth to take upon Himself, man’s rejection of God the Father…

I realized that I too, not just Adam and Eve, had rejected God!

I have not given Him the relationship that He desired…Mine is one of religious ritual… Only when I need or want something do I go to Him…

I do what I have been taught…rote prayers, traditions and rituals to get a result…which is not what I have been reading in Jesus’ life…Hmmmm….

The next journal entry;

…I have asked God the Father, just in quiet Prayer to have that personal relationship with Him through His Son Jesus…

I have accepted the amazing lengths Jesus went to for me…being born as one of us but conceived by the Spirit of God, living as a man, being cruelly and brutally killed on that cross when He was God…taking on all of our rejection upon Himself…

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I asked Him to forgive me for my rejection of Him in my words, thoughts and actions…

I accepted His miraculous arising from death…And His ascending into Heaven…God in all His fullness is AWESOME!

This is what it means to be ‘born anew of the Spirit’ (also known as born again)… God’s Spirit has come into a personal and intimate relationship with me… Our new adventure has just begun!

Today…

…There’s a popular belief circulating that there are many ways/paths that lead to God the Father and spending eternity with Him.

This is a deception my friend, as Jesus said continually while here on earth, that there is only one way to the Father…through a personal relationship with Him, Jesus the Christ…

This personal relationship is open and available to all…

All we have to do is ask Jesus as I did above…

We have a choice & God will not interfere with our freedom in that choice… We either choose to have that personal and intimate relationship in being ‘born anew of the Spirit’ or not…

Each has to make their own decision…no one can make it for you. It’s yours to freely choose…

It takes that choice to have that relationship with Him and live out our life continually within that relationship.

Let me ask you dear friend…

Where will you spend eternity?

Because there is life after death, I have been there & its documented! I shared the amazing experience that you may read in Chapter Three…

Where we will spend Eternity is our personal choice…either with God…

In a place eternally without Him, without His peace, without any hope, without His love, without His light, without any way to get to Him…& it would have been a personal choice to be in that place of eternal hoplessness!

Please choose wisely! For the most important prayer you’ll ever pray click here

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Some pages have been omitted in this complimentary read

© I go to prepare a place for you, Jennifer M. Ross, 2017, excerpt from pp. 19-23. All rights reserved. No part of this chapter may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.